


Post-Death Routine

by chiiyo86



Category: Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard - Rick Riordan
Genre: First Time, Genderfluid, Hand Jobs, Kissing, M/M, POV First Person, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-15
Updated: 2019-02-15
Packaged: 2019-10-15 16:20:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17532101
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chiiyo86/pseuds/chiiyo86
Summary: Magnus wakes up on a Wednesday after having been smashed by a boulder. That's business as usual. Alex's behavior after he wakes up is much more puzzling.





	Post-Death Routine

**Author's Note:**

  * For [plumeria47](https://archiveofourown.org/users/plumeria47/gifts).



> I hope I did the pairing justice! Enjoy the treat. :)

I woke up in my bed, on a Wednesday, after having been smashed by a boulder. I was a bit hungry.

If I sounded flippant about the whole smashed-by-a-boulder incident, this was because that kind of thing was business as usual for an einherji in Hotel Valhalla. I knew for sure that the day was Wednesday, because Wednesdays are for siege warfare, and I remembered the boulder flying at me pretty clearly. 

I blinked, trying to chase the vision from my mind. I’d died in many horrific ways—shot by arrows, skewered by swords, beheaded by axes—but for an instant, as I remembered that boulder, my hunger turned into nausea and twisted my stomach. I swallowed, my mouth suddenly full of spit, and rolled to my side, which was when I saw that Alex was sitting on the edge of my king-sized bed.

“Oh,” I said. “Uh. Hey.” Yes, I’m the epitome of eloquence. Thank you for noticing.

I’d woken up after dying plenty of times and no one was generally with me when I did. Most of my friends were usually busy waking up from their own deaths, and even when they’d come out of the battle alive, they didn’t stick around to watch me revive. As I said, it had become pretty banal for us. It would be like watching someone sleep at night—weird, intrusive, and kind of creepy. In top of the general weirdness of the situation, the way Alex was looking at me was very odd. I wasn’t sure how I would qualify it, but it wasn’t one of Alex’s normal expressions, and I’d become very adept at cataloguing those.

“Are you okay?” he asked. I was also quite adept at picking up with one glance on Alex’s current gender.

His tone was brusque, and I was suddenly under the impression that I’d done something to anger him. Except that no matter how much I wracked my brain, I had no idea on how I might have screwed up.

“Um, sorry?” I said in the less convincing apology ever uttered by man.

Alex’s frown deepened. “What for, stupid?”

I relaxed a little—this already sounded more Alex-like, so I probably hadn’t woken up in an alternate dimension. A lot of really, really strange stuff had happened to me in my life and then in my afterlife, but I think that was where I would have drawn the line.

“I don’t know,” I said, “but you’re making a weird face.”

“Your face is weird,” Alex said, but it sounded like an automatic tit-for-tat reply. It rang false, like Alex was covering for something else.

My stomach rumbled loudly before I could come up with a witty reply of my own. I sat up in my bed, pushing back the covers, and grimaced sheepishly. I hadn’t realized how starved I was.

“It’s not a surprise that you’d be hungry,” Alex said in a strangely flat voice. “You’ve missed dinner by a few hours.”

My eyebrows shot up in surprise. Seeing Alex at my bedside, I’d assumed that he hadn’t died at all, so I hadn’t thought much of the fact that he was awake before me. Because I was always the first to wake up. My healing powers meant that I came back to life faster than others, and I generally had a few hours to myself before all of my friends were up and about. I never slept—or whatever verb you should use when you’re temporarily dead—past dinner time. 

“What?” I said. “What time is it? How long was I out?”

Alex pursed his mouth, as though contemplating something very disagreeable. “It’s the middle of the night. Don’t you remember anything?”

“You’re going to have to be more specific than that.”

“About how you died, I mean,” Alex said, rolling his eyes at me.

It was my time to frown. “Well, I got smashed by a boulder, didn’t I? I remember that. It was a pretty big boulder. Very solid.”

“Nothing else?” Alex asked. “Because you didn’t—you didn’t die right away.”

The boulder coming at me was the last thing I remembered clearly, but Alex’s insistence made me try harder to recall if anything else had happened after the impact. I remembered pain—that was par for the course. I remembered screaming. Had I been the one screaming, or was it someone else? Again, my stomach lurched with a feeling that wasn’t hunger, and my vision field started to gray at the edges. My face must have changed color, too, because Alex grabbed my shoulder and said hurriedly, “It’s okay, you don’t have to remember. It’s really not worth remembering.”

“Okay,” I said numbly; the screaming was still ringing in my ears. 

“Look at me. Magnus, look at me!”

I looked. I was good at following Alex’s orders. I looked into his brown-and-amber eyes. There was still a crease between his eyebrows and the line of his mouth was hard, but the severe expression actually made me feel better. Honestly, just having Alex’s eyes on me for any uninterrupted length of time was enough to make me feel on top of the world. 

“You’re fine,” Alex said, like he could just command me to be okay.

To his credit, it did work. I snorted a laugh, my shoulders drooping as I relaxed, and said, “Aye, aye, captain.”

After a few long seconds, Alex smiled too. “Smartass,” he murmured.

And then he kissed me.

I stopped breathing. His lips were warm against mine and his hand was still gripping my shoulder. We’d kissed a couple of times before—well, _Alex_ had kissed me before, and I’d always been too stunned to do much, quite like I was now. Apart from those kisses we interacted like friends, if your definition of friendship included regular bloody battles, quests to stop the end of the world, and a number of extreme games that always resulted in someone dying. I didn’t overthink it too much—except when I did—because I figured that we had years, even centuries to figure it out. It was one of the perks of the afterlife; not much seemed urgent anymore.

I expected Alex to pull away after a few seconds, as he’d always done before, but the kiss kept going, his mouth moving against mine and his breath tickling my lips. His hand moved up and down my arm, then up again, sliding over my nape and then cupping the back of my head. My breath hitched in my chest. My face was on fire. This was the single hottest thing to have ever happened to me—not that there was a lot to compare it to—and I didn’t know how to react to it except by letting Alex go as far as he wanted to. Which was apparently even further, because he clambered onto my bed, rising on his knees and pushing me against the headboard. I hit my head, but the pain barely registered; everything else felt too good, and I’d developed a pretty high tolerance for pain since I’d become an einherji. Alex shuffled closer, and closer, and without thinking about it I opened my legs to welcome him. 

I think at this point it’s worth mentioning to the reader that I was practically naked, wearing only my underwear. It was always like that after waking up from a death, because our clothes were generally too damaged and/or bloodstained to be used again, so I guess the staff disposed of them somehow. Who dealt with undressing our dead bodies was one of those matters that didn’t bear thinking about too hard. Anyway, this meant that as Alex and I started making out rather heavily, a certain part of my anatomy took notice. 

As soon as I realized it, I pulled away from Alex. It was probably stupid, but I was embarrassed—you see, no one had ever looked at a boner of mine before, especially when it was only barely clad in my underwear. Alex didn’t let go of my shoulders but held me at arm-length, with enough distance between us that when I looked down, I could see that he was in a similar state. _He_ was wearing pants, but I knew the shape of a hard dick when I saw it. 

That gave me pause. If I was perfectly honest, I had to admit that I’d thought before about what happened to Alex’s body whenever he switched genders. Don’t judge me; everyone thinks about what their crush looks like without their clothes on. It was just that there was a wider variety of options with Alex than with most people. I’d thought about Alex being male when he kissed me, and after a short debate with myself I’d come to the conclusion that I didn’t care, that the fact that Alex wanted to kiss me trumped every other consideration. Still, that hard dick looking at me in the face—awkward phrasing, sorry—had caught me off guard. I wasn’t repulsed or anything—quite the contrary, in fact. Just… pausing. There was also the fact that it showed Alex was turned on, and that _I_ was the cause of his arousal. Me, whose claim to glory was That Time I Had Beaten Loki at Flyting; me, who died on a regular basis in ways that ranged from awkwardly ridiculous to appallingly gross. Alex had seen me inside out, and I mean that literally.

Alex shifted a little further away from me, his hands slipping down to my elbows, which made me look at his face again. His cheeks were flushed but his chin was up, his expression closed-off, challenging, telling me that it didn’t matter what I said or did, because he didn’t care one way or another. I knew better, of course. I knew that I had to tread carefully, because I risked wounding him very deeply. 

So, you know, because I’m so smooth, the next thing I did was reach down and cup Alex’s hard-on. It was Alex’s turn to _pause_. His eyes widened and his lips parted—his lips that were very, very red from all the kissing we’d done. Alex wasn’t one to back down when you upped the ante, though, so he got over his surprise quickly and retaliated at once, leaning forward and covering _my_ dick with his hand. I gasped; I shuddered. My dick jumped, shocked and thrilled at such intimate contact from a hand that wasn’t mine. 

We remained in a sort of stalemate, each with a hand on the other’s dick, for the next few seconds. My mind spun from a jumbled mess of feelings: excitement at the situation, confusion at how we’d gotten there, mixed with a little fear. I could see the same sentiments reflected in Alex’s mismatched eyes, except that the fear was expressed in a very Alex way, by a steely, tight-jawed refusal to take back what he’d just done. It wasn’t surprising, then, that he was the first to rub the heel of his hand down my erection. My hips jerked up from the bed at the rush of pleasure. 

Could you call it a hand job when your junk was still clothed? Maybe you just called it rubbing. Sexy rubbing. Alex and I rubbed each other’s dicks, first with awkward, stilted movements, then with increased urgency. Alex had strong hands, probably from all the pottery work he did, and his grip on me was firm. At some point, one of us started kissing the other again, but I wasn’t sure who. It might have been me, for once. I was the first to come, embarrassingly fast, chewing on my lower lip so hard I drew blood. To feel _Alex_ come, feel his dick pulse under my hand, was almost as good as my own orgasm.

Alex exhaled, licked his lips, then very casually rocked back on his heels. “I imagine you have tissues in there,” he said in a voice that was only a little rough, pointing at my nightstand. 

“Uh, yeah,” I said, blushing like an idiot. 

The thought flashed through my head that maybe Alex sometimes masturbated as a boy. Glancing at him, I could see a wet spot darkening the crotch of his pants. I looked away before I gave myself another boner.

We cleaned up as nonchalantly as it was possible to do that kind of thing, then I leaned back against my pillows. I was still hungry, but also exhausted, and all I wanted was to go to sleep. I realized that I’d closed my eyes and forced them open.

“Will you tell me what happened that made you freak out so badly?” I asked Alex.

He narrowed his eyes. “Freak out? Me? When did I do that?”

“Well, all this,” I said, waving a hand between the two of us. “That’s, uh, not our usual post-death routine.” We didn’t really have a post-death routine, mind you, but you get my point.

“And you think the only reason I’d want to kiss you is because I’m freaking out?” He smirked. “Maybe I did it because I think you’re cute.”

Well, as you can imagine, that declaration pretty much robbed me from my ability to speak. Alex reached out and cupped my cheek, his thumb brushing lightly against the spot where I’d bitten through my lip; it had healed already, but there was some drying blood left. I spluttered. The fact that this made Alex want to kiss me again was one more mystery to add to the pile.


End file.
